MarketAxess Holdings Inc. (MKTX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Barclays 23rd Global Financial Services Conference. I'm Ben Budish, I cover the U.S. brokers, asset managers and exchanges. With us for this next fireside chat, we've got from MarketAxess, CEO, Chris Concannon; and CFO, Ilene Fiszel Bieler. Welcome. Thanks so much for being here.

Great. Thanks for having us, Ben.

Maybe just to kick it off, Chris, I think something investors are really interested in is some of the changes you've been making in the block trading business, something you guys have been talking a lot about on the earnings calls. Maybe unpack a little bit of what you're seeing, what's driving the success of block trading for EM and Eurobonds? What's kind of different about those markets versus the U.S.? Why are traders attitudes seemingly different to electronic blocks?

Great question. And again, thanks for having us here today. And it is a topic that I probably spend a lot of time on, but it's an exciting topic for me because there is a transformation that can happen in the fixed income market, and we only see the shorter end of that transformation. There's so much more to do. I know this is a fireside chat, but I thought we would just have a quick slide show just basically explain what we're facing and what we're trying to do. What I wanted to show was on this slide, really just some of the revenue challenges that we've been having at MarketAxess, particularly around the U.S. credit business. If you look at our other revenue, which is about 50% of our total revenue, we are growing that non-U.S. credit revenue at like a 13% rate. So very attractive growth rates, particularly in a fintech company like MarketAxess. On the U.S. credit side, that's where all the challenge has been. And that's why we're trying to attack different parts of the market, particularly the block market or the portfolio trading market. Revenue has been relatively flat in that part of our business. The really 4 reasons why revenue is really flatlined. One is we all know the macro market has not been ideal for MarketAxess. We do exceptionally well in higher volatility where spreads widen out, capture rate can increase. We saw that in the second quarter, where April, we saw that spike of volatility that has subsided. And so obviously, the macro market has an impact on our growth rates and revenue. Second has really been growth of protocols, and this goes to your question, there are protocols now in the market that we've been slow to move on, portfolio trading and the dealer-to-dealer protocols. Those are areas where when you do win at that protocol, it comes at a lower capture rate. So we've seen the impact of capture rates just doing these different protocols like portfolio trading. The third biggest challenge is, obviously, we see leakage. Our traditional small ticket size trading in RFQ has leaked into portfolio trading. So many of our clients have told us they've moved some of their traditional RFQ on MarketAxess into a portfolio trade. It's a much larger sized notional trade. But again, it's small tickets being placed into PT. And that's kind of leaked into a market where we're not dominant, and we're now growing our PT market share, which you can see on the right side of the slide. The last challenge is just, again, macro out of our control. It's really duration. We've seen with the rate moves, the yield curve kind of invert and the activity of longer-term bonds has slowed down in the market, and that's impacted capture. We do a lot -- we make a lot more money in that higher duration bonds. So those are the kind of 4 things that have really challenged our top line growth, particularly in U.S. credit. Obviously, portfolio trading, we are attacking that market. We're growing share quarter-over-quarter, and we're seeing results of putting very good technology and data and analytics in the market, you get better results. Now that's the bad news. The good news...

Yes, can I -- if you go back, I'm just kind of curious, I think investors are very attuned to like TRACE, what levels of TRACE electronified. It's pretty easy when the top 2 competitors are public and give you a lot of data every month. What about outside the U.S.? So to what degree is this market share gains, electronic market share gains? Is duration impacting your fee capture rate outside the U.S.? How would you characterize that 13% non-U.S.?

It's a great question because that non-U.S., obviously, EM is the biggest portion of non-U.S. and the fastest-growing piece. And we're still seeing low electronic penetration in the EM market. So the opportunity there is quite large. EM, including local markets, are greater than all of U.S. credit. So the market opportunity in EM is exciting. Things like duration still impact us in the EM market. But we've just added to our EM market. We've just launched trading in India, a key component of the EM market now in the benchmark, which is important. So some of those -- that 13% growth rate of non-U.S. credit is really driven by EM rates, Eurobonds, all things where we're increasing the electronic penetration. And that's where we go to our next slide. Some of that growth is being driven by larger trade sizes. So in U.S. credit, and this is the reason why I am fixated on the next 50% of the U.S. credit market. If you can see here, 46% of TRACE are trades of larger size. And those are largely served by chat and phone. So here we are in 2025, we're ordering our food and our cars on an app, and we're still trading huge blocks over the phone or in chat. That's not sustainable in this environment as you see big asset managers looking for efficiency, their capture rates are coming down. Their costs are being managed carefully. They want to make this part of the market efficient. So when I look at TRACE, this is just IG. The market opportunity for MarketAxess is 2x our current market position. And that's just larger trade size. So how do we attack those larger trade sizes? And look, we've been making some inroads. If you look at year-to-date 2025, we are starting to crack the block market. But the 2 ways that we've invested to attack that block market has been, one, automation. Our view is clients are adopting automation. We're seeing signs of using automation to trade larger sizes. That's something we've invested in heavily. We had an acquisition of Pragma to help us. The other part is new, and that's just changing how we target dealers on our platform for block size. And we call this targeted RFQ. It's only launched recently in Q1 in EM and EU, and we're seeing signs of growth. But that's basically saying, don't go to all, which has been traditionally a market access theme, go to a short list of dealers. And lo and behold, we help you select those dealers. So what we wanted to do is show -- just -- I have 3 quick -- I know this is a fireside chat, but 3 quick case studies that we did with 3 different clients. One is a big U.S. fixed income asset manager, big adopter of automation. They've certainly embraced automation as an efficiency play. And they started to study their execution quality of larger size, and they found that on the liquid end of the bond, they could do much larger size. So they used automation in this scenario. And this has been playing out in 2025, and you don't see it under the covers of monthly market share, but this movement is quite substantial. They've been able to increase using automation block size or greater than $2 million. And now their automation has increased from 14%. So now it's making up 35% of their volume on MarketAxess is now through block trading of automation. So a sizable move. And counting those blocks in automation, that's now 80% of their tickets. And...

I think also, I was just going to say -- and it also shows that they are trading more, right? The volume is greater. We know the tickets are greater, but the volume is greater as well as they're adopting more in automation.

And what's exciting in again, U.S. high grade, we are seeing the number of clients trading blocks increase to 35%. And overall block trading is up. Overall block trading on our platform is up 38% this year alone. So we're seeing it across all products, and that's the exciting piece. Eurobonds, another exciting, this launched in Q1. This is a client -- this client has gone through a consolidation, so they're looking for efficiency gains and how they trade. They turned and -- they actually helped us design our targeted RFQ for blocks. So they wanted to know dealer content, enrich that dealer content and they've been able to actually make use of this targeted tool. They've increased their number of blocks that they're trading quarter-over-quarter, and we're still seeing great feedback from that same client. In Eurobonds, where we've seen the biggest growth rate in blocks, our blocks are up. Number of clients trading blocks are on the platform are up 47%. We're seeing that block count continue to grow month-over-month in Eurobonds.

Volumes in Eurobonds, just to get -- and you guys probably saw this, but in August, they were up 95%.

And then just turning to our third case study, this is in EM. Again, EM is a great market for larger-sized trades. Obviously, it's filled with sovereign debt. So there's a lot of -- clients are used to trading larger size. What they are very interested in is not having information leakage. So they want to go to a targeted list of dealers. The other challenge for EM is it's a diverse liquidity solution. So dealers in certain segments of the market are strong in those kind of local bonds. So you have to find the right dealers. So that diversity of dealer is a big challenge for clients. We have built a dealer selection tool. So we use our own proprietary data, not just the dealer data to help clients make those selections. And in EM, it's working. What's impressive is that client when they use our selection tool, they increase their fill rate. So 76% of their block trades are being done by the dealer that we preselect for them. That's really powerful. And the feedback in EM, that's super helpful because finding that dealer across the EM market in those local bonds is very difficult. So dealer selection is a powerful ingredient. And here in EM, we're seeing block trading increase year-over-year. And then we are also seeing the number of clients adopting block trading in EM grow as well. So I know this long-winded answer to your block trading question, but it's an area -- look, one, we think that, that market opportunity is enormous, and we don't see those blocks moving to any other channel other than an e-trading solution. You just need to replicate the data that they see in chat and on phone. That's a key ingredient. Two, we are now seeing what we've been predicting play out, obviously, playing out in EM and Eurobonds, but we're also starting to see the excitement for it in US IG as well. And so the thesis that, that next 50%, that 46% of the IG market can come on to an e-trading platform. That's the opportunity that we've been building for and are super focused on.

Maybe just a couple of follow-ups. So in the U.S., you've had a number of targeted initiatives, the buildout of X-Pro to try to get people conditioned to not go to all but to go to that targeted list. Where are you in that process? Like how many of -- like the big fixed income trading firms are getting that experience when they see their market...

So in US IG, that's where we are most focused on the block solution because it's -- obviously, there's a broad liquid end. We have increased blocks that targeted solution right now is we're still filling out the dealer data. So a key ingredient to clients get comfortable trading a block is making sure that they're seeing dealer content from all their key dealers. And that's been where we've been spending all our time is that dealer content. We also have a really -- we've gotten great feedback on our -- we've put AI into our dealer selection tool in IG. So we're seeing great feedback on we're now able to help select the dealer to trade the block with. And that's a powerful ingredient. This is slow. It's much slower than I'd like, but it is -- we're seeing that trading behavioral change occur, particularly in EM, where we have really strong dealer data, both in EM and Eurobonds. And so where we have strong data, we're seeing the trader behavior change. In IG, we're still filling out that dealer data. And so it's certainly being worked on. The good news is dealers are not objecting to putting their content on the platform. They want to know who it's going to and who's seeing it, but it's really a matter of where they are in the queue of pushing this data into our platform.

Got it. How should investors think about that time line? We're all an impatient bunch. When you say it will be slow, does that mean a couple of quarters, a year, is there any way to kind of get a sense?

It's definitely months and quarters, not years. We've been at it. We're seeing dealers onboard literally every month, adding to that dealer content. You don't have to get for the last dealer to have a robust kind of solution. And we're adding additional traders to the pilot group in the block trading solution. That said, we're still -- our automation is growing. It's one of the fastest-growing protocols that we have on the platform globally, and we're seeing more and more blocks move into automation. So we're attacking it with this new solution in our X-Pro solution where we need that dealer data, but we're also attacking the block market through automation. And so both are yielding results.

Maybe one more follow-up. I mean, how do you think about the interplay between blocks and portfolio trading? I've heard your competitor talk about portfolio trading as one of the solutions to blocks. Investors get used to single large size trades that kind of make sense logically. Is that part of your strategy? Or are they very much separate? Or is it, I don't know, everything -- whatever works best.

So what's interesting is the protocol is similar, right? Someone loads a portfolio trade. They want to see pricing from dealers and they want to engage a single dealer. They typically don't go out to a large list. It's usually a short list of 3 dealers because they don't want information leakage of the portfolio. So the protocol is very similar to a dealer loading a block and only showing it to a short list. So ironically, very similar protocol. The outcome is very different. Portfolio trade, what we've analyzed is portfolio trades average ticket size is under $1 million. So you have big trades, but small tickets, which just lots of tickets. And what we've seen is portfolio pricing improves when you avoid putting blocks into a PT. And so that block market is still ripe to transition. The portfolio trade is really the leading edge of the block market. So I agree with our competitor that it's very similar. In fact, many times, the portfolio trader is the block trader. And so what's good news is e-trading has now went to the biggest part of the market. PTs are anywhere from $100 billion to $10 billion. And it's the same kind of group of traders that trade blocks as well.

Really interesting. Maybe switching gears a little bit, stepping back. You kind of mentioned in some of your initial commentary that there's a lot of macro factors that impact your share, the duration, the capture rates. Can you talk a bit about what you're seeing more recently, volatility spreads, how other exogenous factors are impacting the business? I think by now, we have your August update that came out last week. What are you seeing so far in September? How does the back half of the year seem to be shaping out?

Sure. One, like if you look at the macro market, it's been challenging for our model. Obviously, July and August -- even August, we had low vol, very tight spreads. I mean our dealer friends are talking about this is the tightest they've seen in years. So that makes for our protocol where we're providing additional liquidity or alternative liquidity, less in demand. Things like portfolio trading grow, things like dealer-to-dealer matching grows, all those protocols grow in that lower vol environment. Moving to September, it's a very interesting environment in September. You see a sizable new issue in the market. So we're seeing portfolio turnover. Volumes are obviously robust. And there's obviously a rate move that's hopefully pending and that can have an impact on the overall macro market. I don't know, do you want to add?

Yes. I would just say on the rate side, we all know that the probabilities on rate cuts change quite frequently. But I think what we've seen most recently, particularly with the jobs data that came out in August is obviously now I think CME FedWatch is talking about 3 cuts again, September seems folks seem pretty bullish about that particular cut. And so what you're starting to see, and we have to wait and see September 16, 17, it's going to be here soon for the FOMC. But what you're starting to see is some positioning around that in terms of what we're seeing on duration. You guys might remember that a few months back, we were seeing, call it, in the 8.5% range in terms of duration and weighted average years to maturity. Then last month, we saw that go to about 9%, and it's increased a little bit in early days, first few days of September. But you're definitely seeing sort of a much more normalized yield curve. So think about this, right? If you look at the short end of the curve right now, you're seeing for the first time since, I think, 2022, you're seeing where yields have come in. And if you just take a look at the curve, it just looks quite a bit more normalized. And as people start to talk about, "Oh, is it a bear steepener, is it a bull steepener, if we see the jobs data where it is if inflation stays in check, and there's an argument to be made for both steepener, right? So we have to see early days with the way everything is moving, and we'll see what the Fed does, but we're certainly seeing people positioning for cuts.

And what's exciting about any rate movement by the Fed is it really has our portfolio managers kind of recycling parts of their portfolio. So they are -- there's more movement in the portfolio adjustments that we see in the market, and those are just favorable to overall market volumes. And if you look at where market volumes sit today and the new issue market that's growing, it's only going up. So that trace volume continues to grow with every new issue that we see in the market.

So what would you say are the most important factors maybe going into 2026, spread widening, market volatility, ongoing new issuance. I know there's a lot of different factors, but obviously a normalized yield curve could be pretty impactful to the FPM. But what do you think could evolve in like the most maybe constructive way for MarketAxess?

Sure. There's -- I think about it as those things that are controllable and noncontrollable. So on the noncontrollable side, any type of market volatility is favorable. We're at very low vol. And when it happens, it's episodic. It's not -- it doesn't sit around for a quarter or 2 like we saw in 2020, where the full year was just volatility. Second is rate movement is helpful as we talked about, certainly helps the yield curve and duration extension. But what we can control is really delivery of product that our clients are asking for. And that we need to accelerate. We've been -- we just launched our Mid-X solution for dealer-to-dealer is launching next week. That was put into production this week. We've launched a number of larger-sized orders solutions, more data is coming to the market. So we just as a firm, the things that we control, we have to -- we're going through a technology transformation. We have to move it quicker so we can deliver product and solutions to our base.

Maybe coming back to some of the protocols, we unpacked block trading quite a bit. Let's talk about portfolio trading a little bit. You've shown some progress over the last year or 2 in terms of your electronic -- your market share of PT volumes. What would you say were the key changes you made to catch up? How do you feel about your current level of PT share versus where you'd like to be?

One, I'm not satisfied where we need to be. I do think we can be the dominant portfolio trading tool globally. When I think about portfolio trading, it's something we see across all markets, and we need to have a solution that crosses all product. Two, it's -- we are in a position with unique data. Given our market size and RFQ, we have some unique data and insights that we can share with our clients. When they're -- the biggest question we get from clients is, how do I optimize this portfolio? What's the right portfolio to trade? And we have lots of analytics that help them really size a portfolio. We're seeing portfolio pricing degrades somewhere around $400 million in IG. So any portfolio trades that are larger, you start to see degradation of the price and execution quality. And that makes sense. That's a lot of balance sheet someone's handing you. They want returns on that balance sheet. So all of this data that we're sharing with clients is helping them optimize portfolio trades. Anything that is a misweighting of a single line item, you have a block size line item sitting inside a portfolio trade. Even if it's $500 million, it's going to cost you too much money for that overall PT. So those adjustments, while minor, are meaningful to execution quality and the traders that we are servicing really care about that. The other piece is we're now deploying AI to the same analytical approach to PT, which is super exciting, where clients are coming to us and saying, here's what I'd like to do. Can you give me portfolio suggestions to make up that coverage in the market. And so that's another place where I think there's exciting novel new things that we are doing. And the last piece is dealers have to recycle risk. And we have been slow to solve the dealer electronic recycling of risk. And that's just important to our dealer relationships. So things like the launch of Mid-X, which allows a dealer to take down a portfolio trade, turn around and show that inventory to the market and trade at mid. That's an exciting solution for dealers, and that's something we haven't addressed in the U.S. IG market. So it's one, the portfolio trade itself with the client, but also how dealers get out of that risk is an important component to PT trading.

Got it. We'll come back to the dealer topic in a moment. But just one more follow-up on portfolio trading. You mentioned earlier that you're seeing like smaller tickets find their way into portfolio trades. I mean how do you think about the longer-term potential for portfolio trading relative to the broader markets? How much market activity could be handled through portfolio trades in some end states?

Yes, there's a lot of factors that will go into that. One is the efficiency of the rest of the market because the portfolio trade is a very efficient trade, but it also is a well-priced trade. So we're seeing the competition by the dealers is delivering an execution quality that's quite high for the size of balance sheet that they're exposing in those portfolio trades. It's clearly increased turnover in the market. We're hearing from clients that before portfolio trading, they couldn't move this quickly in resizing their portfolios. So it's a wonderful tool for just overall turnover in the market. I do think we've seen it -- do I think it goes to 30% of the market? It's very hard for it to get over 20%. Low teens to mid-teens is where we've seen it at its highest and its peak. Remember, these are balance sheet-intensive trades. What you win in a portfolio trade doesn't always leave your inventory, and it can take years to actually price the cost of that trade. So one, it's -- I would say there's a short list of dealers doing something that's very balance sheet intensive that makes -- that constrains how big it can get as a percent of market. And then as we automate the other portions of the market, we're delivering new efficiencies that make up some of the challenges. Look, when PMs are facing trading bonds manually, PTs portfolio trade looks really attractive. When things are much more automated and they're getting high execution quality, then there will be a balancing act where they'll have to decide, do I need to go to the portfolio market and trade these large PTs or can I get a lot more done electronically?

Got it. Maybe moving back to the D2D business. Just high level, how are you thinking about the strategy here? You talked about the Mid-X solution. What are you doing to be more competitive in this segment?

One, the dealer-to-dealer market has grown across all our markets, not just in U.S. credit, but across Eurobonds as well as EM. And we're seeing it, it's a sizable portion of the treasury market as well. It's really how do we get dealers out of their inventory in the dealer community. And now inter-dealer brokers have existed for a long time. That's a less efficient means of exiting risk. So really, that dealer-to-dealer market, we arguably have underserved. So we have dealer RFQ, but the launch of Mid-X in US IG is a very important part of our relationship with our dealer community. We want to deliver something that not only does it -- do we help them get into risk, but we're also helping them efficiently get out of risk on our platform. So we're making sizable investments in that dealer-to-dealer space. The good news is in things like EM and Eurobonds, we already have launched those dealer-to-dealer solutions, and we're seeing growth in that segment. Again, it's not as attractive capture rate, but it is growing. And so we're making sure we solve the dealer-to-dealer business and those other products that we already are growing in across the -- outside the U.S.

How important is price in this segment?

Dealers are highly elastic. So they do move volume around price when they can control selection. When a client requests a trade from them. They have to go to the platform where that client chooses to request. So clients are less elastic, but dealers can move volume and they do move volume when there is a lower fee for execution.

And understanding the Mid-X solution hasn't really been launched yet in the U.S., right? We still saw even last month, we're seeing additional volumes just in terms of what we're doing with our dealer community up 18%. So we're excited to see where this goes in terms of the new launches here in the U.S. as well because we've seen success in our other categories.

And just a timing question, just to kind of level set. So I think you mentioned it launches next week. Will it be broadly available across your dealer community? Does it take some time?

So it clearly takes time to grow liquidity in a mid-market matching solution. The good news is it's available to all dealers next week where we've been spending the summer showing dealers the product, getting them trained up and certainly marketing the solution to dealers. So on the first day, there would be a nice healthy group of dealers coming in. It's also priced efficiently for the dealers. So that's an attractive solution. This is all new incremental revenue in a new protocol that we haven't had in the past. So it's kind of exciting growth to add not only share in IG, but also new revenue. The more important part is it also puts us in a better position with our dealer partners. Obviously, the dealers look at platforms is not helpful to their business. That has changed. And so us delivering things that help them exit risk is a key component of us growing a partnership with that dealer community.

Maybe switching gears a little bit. You talked about algorithmic trading a little bit earlier. Maybe just high level, what's your view on the overall adoption of algorithmic trading by the buy side and to what extent is this increasing electronification? Is there potential for more bond market liquidity? You kind of suggested yes, earlier and potential for turnover to meaningfully improve and then what are the P&L implications? Clearly, more electronic volume is positive? How do we think about the fee capture rate for MarketAxess?

Sure. I'll start with automation and what we're doing there and the excitement around that, and you can cover our capture rate across our automation. So in automation, there's multiple tools that we're delivering to clients. One is just auto RFQ, really just a no-touch solution where they can do what they do electronically, but do it without touching the trading platform. That's been growing sizably anywhere from 30% to 40% a year because clients need to be more efficient. It's also been growing with our clients that are either acquiring or building large SMA businesses, another area of the fixed income market that is growing rapidly. Those small trade sizes have to get efficiently executed. So automation is just perfect for that type of client. Algorithmic trading, so taking a larger size and putting it inside an algo and then executing electronically over a period of time is still growing on the platform. We launched that over 1.5 years ago, and we're seeing more and more clients adopt it, more and more clients come in to use it. What's exciting is we've seen a number of very large traditional money managers providing price into our market. You can only do that in our all-to-all platform, but being a price maker for the first time, which is -- that's not what we've seen in the past clients providing price. So we've seen 1 or 2 large asset managers focus on just providing an algorithmic into the market. Traditionally, we've seen that from kind of the systematic community or hedge fund community. But for the first time, we're seeing a large asset manager actually being a price leader. And if you think about it, these large asset managers know where they want to buy bonds and where they want to sell bonds. So for them to create a price, they just need the tooling to actually price bonds on a regular basis. And that's been an exciting outcome from our investment in automation. The surprising area where we've seen sizable growth is in the rates market. When we bought Pragma, we were very focused on the credit market. We rolled out that algorithm into rates. And now we've seen some of our largest clients adopting the algo solution to move treasury bonds and they move them in big clips. These are $1 billion orders, not like $100,000 orders. So these are sizable orders running through algorithms that will provide VWAP, TWAP and other things that the clients really determine are important to them.

I would just say in terms of particularly on automation, one of the nice things about this protocol is it is in keeping with how our pricing works. So this isn't -- there are other protocols where I know people ask to say, "Oh, well, PT is at a lower fee per million. We all know that. That's been the case for a long time. Chris just talked about the elasticity in the dealer space. But with automation, it really just sort of keeps in right in sync with our other client-initiated pricing, which is great.

Okay. Great. Maybe a couple of separate topics just to touch on before we wrap up. In terms of your ICE partnership, been a little over a year since that was announced, the combination of your liquidity pools. Maybe give us an update there. What's the latest how are volumes trending?

So far, that partnership, one, we're not complete with the integration. So they're on our -- they're connected to our platform. We're integrating liquidity. That's been super exciting, particularly in the muni market where they have the TMC asset that just phenomenal liquidity in munis. Also corporate bonds, the same. So there -- the integration has been seamless. The teams worked quickly together to get it integrated with our platform. We are adding other ways to connect ICE bonds, which is exciting. So it's not just one solution. It's going to be a few solutions. We're including putting liquidity on ICE bonds on our list of things to do. So that's an exciting change as well for that relationship. But it's been a great relationship and certainly one we see growing, and we're not done with that integration, which is exciting.

Got it. Totally separate topic, private credit, this has come up a few times with you guys and some of the alternative asset managers have been increasingly talking about making those markets more liquid. How might MarketAxess be positioned to participate in that trend if it were to really pick up?

One, we agree with the vision that public and private could be together, right? The evolution of public and private being on one platform or one place in the market is the right block process. But they are different markets. One, it's private, so you can't make it distributed to everyone. So it has to be a very controlled solution. But we do see those markets merging together at some point in the future. And certainly look at our distribution channel as a huge asset, whether it's a public credit, a treasury, an EM bond or private credit, we see that distribution channel is a very powerful channel.

And maybe just lastly, capital allocation. I think you've commented recently that the balance sheet is very well positioned for potential M&A. How do you think about that M&A framework? What are your top priorities? What makes sense to buy rather than build?

Well, one, we've been quite conservative in our M&A strategy. We've obviously only looked at smaller things. We will continue to look at our -- when I look at our market opportunity, which we just kind of showed you in the slide, that market opportunity is so amazing. It's very hard to come up with an M&A solution that's better than the market opportunity in front of us. So organic growth strategy is our #1 priority. We see the market opportunity. We don't want to get distracted from that market opportunity. Things that we've seen in the past, if there's something that is technology accretive, meaning it's bringing new tech that we'd otherwise have to build, and it's faster and efficient way, that's interesting. Those are smaller bolt-on solutions. When I look at the broader market, nothing gives us the market opportunity that's in front of us. So organic growth is our #1 priority. If you look at our technology strategy, it's rolling out new products and those are all already in-house. We don't have to go and buy anything. We just have to deliver tech right now. So...

I would just say in terms of overall capital strategy and how we think about it, right? So Chris is talking about the investing in the organic opportunity, that's how we think about sort of first best highest use of capital, right? The next thing you think about really is and you seen us do this is we have looked and said, okay, where does it make sense for us from a share repurchase perspective, and you probably saw over the course of the last year, we increased our Board authorization at the highest level the firm has ever had. We're obviously a very cash-generative business. And so you've seen us go ahead and do additional buybacks this year. And in fact, by the first half of the year, we bought back the same amount, I think, that we did all of last year, right? So we're being very opportunistic in that sense from a share repurchase perspective. And then the last part is what Chris said about M&A, bolt-ons and things that would make sense for our business model and our strategy going forward to help accelerate what we're doing.

Well, we're nearly out of time. So I think we'll have to leave it there. But Chris, Ilene, thank you so much for being here. What a pleasure to have you.

Thanks for having us. Really appreciate it. Thanks.

Thank you.